Research!

Marzluff, John M., et al. “Brain Imaging Reveals Neuronal Circuitry Underlying the Crow’s Perception of Human Faces.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, vol. 109, no. 39, Sept. 2012, pp. 15912–15917. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1073/pnas.1206109109. Link

So this article I found while searching up "John Marzluff" into the academic search. I mainly did this because I knew he had a lot of research done after reading and watching many of the videos. Basically, Marzluff captured wild crows while wearing a mask. Then cared for them with a different one. Later, he would show the crows one of the masks, then used anesthesia on the crows and scanned their brains. What they found was that the crows activated different parts of their brain when seeing the two masks. This means that the crows were able to recognize the faces on the masks, and related it to a "threatening" or "caring" connotation. This is interesting because this means not only do we know which parts of the brain a crow uses to attribute things to danger; but that crows are also capable of taking sensory information, like seeing a face, and changing how they behave with respect to their experiences.

Nieder, Andreas, et al. “A Neural Correlate of Sensory Consciousness in a Corvid Bird.” Science, vol. 369, no. 6511, Sept. 2020, pp. 1626–1629. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1126/science.abb1447. Link

This article from Nieder I found by looking up "bird" into the academic search. Basically, what happened was the scientists shows the crows a stimulus 50% of the time. Then the crows were made to choose "yes" or "no" to if they saw a stimulus. During, this they monitored single-cell neural activity. What they found was that neural activity didn't begin until after the birds received the stimuli, and brain activity was passed around to different parts of the brain. This means that the birds had a "two-stage process in awareness" where the birds thought and made specific, and explicit decisions. This concludes three things, the first is that birds are capable of making conscious decisions. And secondly, animals do not need a layered cerebral cortex (only found in mammals) to have sensory consciousness. Lastly, we can infer that because of conscious decisions in birds, the evolution of conscious thought may have come from the last-common ancestor of birds and mammals 300 million years ago.

Really, what I learned from this is that crows' brains, while different from ours in many ways, are still capable of complex, and explicit thoughts. Whether they be about anger at the face of it's captor, or interest in a human-made test. They are not too different from us.